Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media

Description:

The emergence of New Media has stimulated debate about the power of the visual to dethrone the cultural prominence of textuality and print. Some scholars celebrate the proliferation of digital images, arguing that it suggests a return to a pictorial age when knowledge was communicated through images as well as through words. Others argue that the inherent conflict between texts and images creates a battleground between the feminized, seductive power of images and the masculine rationality of the printed word. Eloquent Images suggests that these debates misunderstand the dynamic interplay that has always existed between word and image.

Arguing that the complex relationship between text and image in New Media does not represent a radical rupture from the past, the book examines rhetorical and cultural uses of word and image both historically and currently. It shows that complex, interpenetrating relationships between verbal and visual communication systems were already evident in hieroglyphic writing and in ancient rhetoric and persist in the work of classical rhetoricians, in cultural studies of technology, even in the binary code distinctions of digital environments. The essays blend theory, critique, and design practice to explore the often contradictory relations of word and image. All of them call for theoretically grounded approaches to hypermedia design.

Mary E. Hocks is Assistant Professor of English and Director of Writing Across the Curriculum at Georgia State University.

Michelle R. Kendrick is Assistant Professor of English in the Program in Electronic Media and Culture at Washington State University.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgements	vii
	Introduction: Eloquent Images Mary E. Hocks and Michelle R. Kendrick	1
I	Visual and Verbal Practices in New Media
1	Critical Theory and the Challenge of New Media Jay David Bolter	19
2	Seriously Visible Anne Frances Wysocki	37
3	The Dialogics of New Media: Video, Visualization, and Narrative in Red Planet: Scientific and Cultural Encounters with Mars Helen Burgess, Jeanne Hamming and Robert Markley	61
II	Historical Relationships between Word and Image
4	Recovering the Multimedia History of Writing in the Public Texts of Ancient Egypt Carol S. Lipson	89
5	Digital Images and Classical Persuasion Kevin LaGrandeur	117
6	The Word as Image in an Age of Digita; Reproduction Matthew G. Kirschenbaum	137
III	Perception and Knowledge in Visual and Verbal Texts
7	Same Difference: Evolving Conclusions about Textuality and New Media Nancy Barta-Smith and Danette DiMarco	159
8	Illustrations, Images, and Anti-Illustrations Jan Baetens	179
9	Cognitive and Educational Implications of Visually Rich Media: Images and Imagination Jennifer Wiley	201
IV	Identities and Culture in Digital Designs
10	Feminist Cyborgs Live on the World Wide Web: International and Not So International Contexts Gail E. Harwisher and Patricia Sullivan	219
11	Unheimlich Maneuver: Self-Image and Identificatory Practice In Virtual Reality Environments Alice Crawford	237
12	Eloquent Interfaces: Humanities-Based Analysis in the Age of Hypermedia Ellen Strain and Gregory VanHoosier-Carey	257
13	Writing a Story in Virtual Reality Josephine Anstey	283
	Contributors	305